New Work on Britain’s First Black Newspaper Editor
Robert Burroughs (Leeds Beckett University) shares some of the recent outcomes of his 2023 Linda H. Peterson Fellowship award, writing:
Did you know that the first black newspaper editor in Britain lived in Victorian times? And that he was famous in his day, publishing hundreds of thousands of words and speaking before tens of thousands of audience members on key social and philosophical issues of his day?
This figure was the Dominican S. J. Celestine Edwards (1858-1894). With the support of the Linda H. Peterson Fellowship (2023), I have been able to complement existing scholarship on Edwards by critically examining new aspects of his career in nineteenth-century oral and literary culture. In particular, the Peterson Fellowship allowed me the opportunity to get to grips with the two periodicals edited by Edwards in the early 1890s: Lux, a weekly which defended Christianity against rising atheism; and Fraternity, a monthly which challenged escalating racial (or ‘caste’) violence on a global scale. I was also able exhaustively to trace materials relating to Edwards in newspapers digitised by the British Library.
I have published an article in the Journal of Victorian Culture, which is based on a paper I gave at the RSVP Conference at the University of Stirling in 2024. The article examines how Edwards positioned the two causes of Christian Evidence and anti-racism side by side in order to amplify his arguments.
I also have a chapter in the forthcoming book Transforming Orality: Articulating Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Britain (eds. Anne-Julia Zwierlein and Katharina Herold-Zanker for Liverpool UP), which examines Edwards’s stage persona and performance. His was indeed a formidable presence. In a prolific campaign of speaking and publishing between 1888 and his death in 1894, which was untimely and (as I discuss in the book chapter) hastened by overwork, Edwards gained nationwide renown among admirers and opponents alike as the era’s ‘Black Champion’. There are many more angles from which this fascinating figure could continue to be examined by students of Victorian literature and culture.
About the Author
Professor Robert Burroughs is Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Leeds Beckett University. He is also Academic Lead of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s Decolonial History Research Project, 2025-2027. His books include Travel Writing and Atrocities (Routledge, 2011), The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade (co-edited, Manchester UP, 2015), African Testimony in the Movement for Congo Reform (Routledge, 2018), and Black Students in Imperial Britain (Liverpool UP, 2022).
Burroughs’s articles have appeared in leading journals including Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Victorian Culture, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Slavery & Abolition, and Postcolonial Studies. He is a recipient of funding from the AHRC, The Leverhulme Trust (Early Career Fellowship and Research Fellowship), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. An expert on King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, in 2022 he served as a witness in the Belgian Parliament’s Special Commission on its colonial past.
.jpg){kind=link}